Tuesday Papers: Osborne to ratify 30 new gas power sites

Top stories

Financial Times: British Chancellor George Osborne is to approve up to 30 gas-fired power stations as part of an Autumn Statement intended to boost private sector infrastructure investment and underpin long-term growth.

Financial Times: Credit Suisse’s banking clients are to be charged for parking their cash with the Swiss bank after it announced plans to introduce negative rates on short-term deposits held by financial institutions in Swiss francs.

Financial Times: The US Securities and Exchange Commission has charged the Chinese affiliates of five leading accounting firms - Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG, PwC and BDO - with violating securities laws for refusing to produce paperwork related to investigations into accounting fraud at nine Chinese companies.

The Guardian: The six banks and building societies that used a flagship scheme designed to boost lending sucked £1 billion out of the British economy in the three months to September.

Financial Times: UBS is in global talks to reach a settlement of more than $450 million over the alleged manipulation of Libor, putting the Swiss bank on track for a record fine in the wide-reaching rate-rigging scandal.

The Daily Telegraph: Sir James Crosby, the former HBOS chief, sold around two-thirds of his holdings in the bank between the time he left in 2006 and its collapse two years later, it emerged at a session of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking on Monday.

Financial Times: Singapore staged a dramatic intervention in the battle between Olam and analyst Carson Block as its state investment agency, Temasek, swung behind a $750 million rights issue by the agriculture group in an attempt to draw a line under the saga.

Financial Times: Rupert Murdoch has revealed senior management appointments across his media empire as he prepares to split News Corp into two separate divisions next year.

Daily Mail: Property tycoons Robert and Vincent Tchenguiz are seeking £200 million in damages from the Serious Fraud Office over its failed fraud case against them.

The Independent: Lamprell continued its rehabilitation on Monday as the beleaguered oil and gas services group, which has issued five profits warnings since the spring, appointed industry veteran James Moffat as the chief executive.

Financial Times: Glenn Hadden, the well-known US Treasuries trader who was hired last year to head Morgan Stanley’s interest rates business, is being investigated by regulators at the CME Group over trades he made while at Goldman Sachs.

The Guardian: Starbucks is cutting paid lunch breaks, sick leave and maternity benefits for thousands of British workers, sparking fresh anger over its business practices.

Business and economics

Financial Times: Brazil’s Vale will slash investments by $1.2 billion next year to the lowest level since 2010 as the world’s second-biggest miner by volume struggles to adjust to the end of the recent China-led commodities boom.

The Guardian: Trafigura, the multinational commodities trading company, is embroiled in an investigation into a Zambian government minister who is accused of taking bribes over a $500 million fuel contract.

The Daily Telegraph: Google and Amazon refused to bow to pressure over their UK tax payments on Monday as the Institute of Directors called for politicians to stop “hectoring from Westminster” and instead move to change Britain’s laws.

Financial Times: Hedge funds have raised their bets that the Japanese yen will tumble in value to levels not seen since before the collapse of the yen “carry” trade in 2008.

Financial Times: The IMF has cemented a substantial ideological shift by accepting the use of direct controls to calm volatile cross-border capital flows, as employed by emerging market countries in recent years.

Financial Times: Greece has launched an aggressive debt buyback programme using up to €10 billion of eurozone funds, hoping it will be enough for an international deal on a wider package that secures its place in the eurozone.

The Daily Telegraph: Spain formally requested €39.5 billion of European funds to recapitalise its struggling banks, while its prime minister held back from ruling out a bail-out for the state also.

The Guardian: George Osborne has prepared the ground for a damaging admission in Wednesday's autumn statement that lower than expected growth means he will breach the second of his fiscal targets, on reducing debt as a proportion of national income by the end of the parliament.

The Independent: Michael Spencer, one of the City's biggest tycoons and a leading Conservative Party donor, has called on the Government to throw its weight more firmly behind business on the eve of the Autumn Statement.

Financial Times: More than 70% of the European commercial property loans that were at the heart of securitisation deals structured before the subprime crisis and that reached maturity this year have not been repaid.

The Guardian: The bottom 50% of households in Britain have just £4,400 of cash, property and pensions compared to the £1.2 million held by the top 10%, according to an Office for National Statistics report.

Financial Times: Blue Energy, a British company, is to build a $400 million, 155MW photovoltaic array in Ghana that will be the largest solar plant in Africa and fourth-biggest in the world when it opens in 2015.

Financial Times: Two companies that produce oil in Iraqi Kurdistan, Genel Energy and DNO International, said they had received long-delayed payments for oil exports from their Kurdish fields, ending a long wait that had unnerved investors.

The Daily Telegraph: Bupa, Britain’s biggest provider of private medical insurance, is to split its health and wellbeing business in a “fundamental” shake-up of operations, which could lead to job cuts.

Financial Times: Mitt Romney, the former Republican presidential candidate, has rejoined the board of Marriott International, the hotel group with annual sales of about $12 billion.

Financial Times: Virgin Atlantic is looking at joining a north Atlantic joint venture between Delta Air Lines and Air France-KLM as part of moves that could involve Sir Richard Branson relinquishing control of the UK airline.

Financial Times: Woodside Petroleum has moved to diversify away from Australia with a $1.25 billion deal for a stake in the giant Leviathan field, the biggest deepwater gas reservoir discovered in the past decade.

The Daily Telegraph: Sir Terry Leahy is to return to the retail industry as chairman of B&M Bargains after the discount chain was bought by private equity firm Clayton Dubilier & Rice.

Financial Times: Dell shares rallied after analysts at Goldman Sachs upgraded the computer maker from “sell” to “buy” with a target price of $13.

Share tips, comment and bids

Financial Times: Dean Foods continued with its break-up plans on Monday, agreeing to sell its Morningstar dairy business to Saputo, a Canadian dairy company, for $1.45 billion.

The Independent: Pickfords - the 400-year-old removal company - has been bought out of administration, as it was immediately bought back by directors Yogesh Mehta and Timothy Romer in a move that preserves 900 jobs.

Financial Times: Apax, the private equity group, has expressed fresh interest in buying the half share in Trader Media Group that it does not already own, in a deal that could net Guardian Media Group £500 million in cash.

Daily Mail: Cable & Wireless Communications has agreed to sell far-flung telecoms businesses from Monaco to the Maldives to Batelco, a Bahrain company, for £423 million.

Financial Times: HMV has sold its live music division Mama Group to Lloyds Development Capital; LDC is also buying HMV’s 50% stake in venue operator Mean Fiddler Group as part of a deal worth £7.3 million.

The Daily Telegraph: The Antipodean investor group bidding for Stansted airport has raised its financial firepower by teaming up with a £15 billion Australian pension fund.

The Guardian (Comment): For all their promises of a new economic model, Britain's politicians on both sides remain stuck on the old debt-fuelled system.

The Guardian (Comment): Would those who say the fiscal cliff is a 'media creation' rather have these negotiations worked out behind closed doors?

The Daily Telegraph (Comment): Amid mounting evidence of recovery in the global economy, there is regrettably one region of the world which remains firmly engulfed in its own little cloud of misery – Europe.

Daily Mail (Comment – Alex Brummer): The announcement of new resources to clamp down on tax avoidance and evasion activity by wealthy individuals and multinationals is useful. But the truth is that for too long HMRC has been focusing on the wrong targets.

Financial Times (Lex): News Corp: the new News Corp will face more investor scrutiny than the old News Corp.

Financial Times (Lex): UBS: settlement of the legacy Libor problem with regulators would strengthen UBS’s investment case as a restructuring play. But first, it has to settle.

Financial Times (Lex): Singapore Air/Virgin: any buyer of the Asian carrier’s stake in the transatlantic airline will have to be about strategy, not cash flow.

Financial Times (Lex): CWC/Batelco: the telecoms network business that emerged from the 2010 demerger at the UK’s Cable & Wireless has struck a $1billion deal with Bahrain.

Financial Times (Lex): Argentina/BNYMellon: however this dispute is resolved, there is more at stake than the obligations of sovereign issuers and the rights of their bondholders.

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